We took another drive of exploration today but very little exploring was actually accomplished. We started out by going west from Hidden Valley RV down Historical Route 66 that is called 333 by New Mexico. At the non-town of Tijeras, we turned south on NM-337 and climbed up to the two collections of non-functioning junk cars of Escabosa and Chilili.
The towns of Escabosa and Chilili seem to be little sovereign nations where new blood, operating automobiles, paying customers and conventional residential construction are unwelcome. They even have large, misspelled signs with pithy messages indicating nobody is to trespass, hunt, gather anything, look funny, think or otherwise disturb the stagnation. We scooted through these towns trying not to look any funnier than normal and continued south on NM-337 until we hit NM-55. A few days ago, we turned west at this intersection. This time we went east and, after crossing over about 10 miles of prairie, we arrived in Estancia.
The drive through this country is pleasant but the towns are just plain old agricultural towns and Estancia is no exception. Estancia is big in pinto bean production. We turned north in Estancia and drove until we arrived in Moriarty and at the intersection with I-40. Moriarty is similar to Estancia except larger and they have a big graveyard next to the freeway that has markers representing unfortunates who were slain by drunk drivers. I didn’t investigate to ascertain whether the drunks were also represented.
We turned west on I-40 back to our spot at HVRVMR. Not a big day today but the stress level certainly was low.